YouTube just released some new stats that show how the service is being consumed on televisions, and the numbers are enormous. Watch time on TV for sports content was up 30 percent year over year; viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts on their TVs every month.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This is YouTube we\u2019re talking about, though, so of course the numbers are huge. The living room has been YouTube\u2019s fastest-growing platform for years \u2014\u00a0Alphabet\u2019s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, said on the company\u2019s most recent earnings call<\/a> that watch time is growing across YouTube \u201cwith particular strength in Shorts and in the living room.\u201d Even as YouTube continues to dominate basically all facets of the entertainment business, the arrow on your TV still points up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The trend hasn\u2019t changed in forever, but YouTube has spent the last couple of years finally doing something about it. It launched a way to sync your phone and your TV<\/a>, so you can watch a video on the big screen and interact with it on the small one. Earlier this year, the company redesigned the TV interface<\/a> to make it easier to find comments, links, and channel pages while you\u2019re watching a video. It redesigned those channel pages<\/a>, so content starts playing more quickly on your TV. It added collaborative playlists, so multiple people can sit around and program the big screen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Today, along with all those stats, YouTube announced a new feature called Watch With, which lets creators add their own commentary and analysis to sports content in real time. For years, YouTube has seen viewers and creators hack this kind of setup together, says Kurt Wilms, YouTube\u2019s senior director of product for TV. \u201cThey\u2019ll put the commentary on their computer or their phone, and then they\u2019ll put the game on their TV.\u201d Now there\u2019s no futzing with two screens. The feature is starting with sports, but Wilms says you can expect to see it all over YouTube soon. \u201cThere\u2019s the Apple keynote,\u201d he offers by way of example. \u201cAll the creators talking about that, you can imagine with Watch With.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Getting the living room experience right has always been tricky for YouTube. The company has always tried to make the platform feel the same no matter how you\u2019re consuming it \u2014 the theory is that YouTube should feel like YouTube no matter what screen you\u2019re looking at and that creators shouldn\u2019t have to think about all the platforms individually but just focus on making stuff for YouTube as a whole. That\u2019s tricky enough to get right across mobile and desktop, but TVs are a completely different beast. You\u2019re usually farther away from the screen; you don\u2019t have easy access to a full keyboard; let\u2019s be honest, you\u2019re probably also still looking at your phone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n YouTube is very much trying to become a premium streaming service<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Wilms tells me that one easy way to think about YouTube in the living room is as a study in extremes. On the one hand, it\u2019s the biggest screen in your house and almost certainly the place you do your most dedicated and focused watching. That\u2019s why YouTube built the quicker-playing channels and why it created a new Shows page that lets creators organize their videos more like a Netflix series. It has invested in Primetime Channels and Sunday Ticket and lots of other high-end content. YouTube is very much trying to become a premium streaming service, without losing focus on creators.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But on the other hand, lots of people use their TVs as a sound system or simply want some background TV. \u201cThe TV is the new home stereo,\u201d Wilms says. Music is huge on living room YouTube, and he says that\u2019s why podcasts are booming, too; you\u2019re just putting on something to listen to while you do dishes or clean up, but now there\u2019s also something to look at.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As YouTube has grown on TVs, it has become a bigger part of the creator economy \u2014 the company said earlier this year that the number of creators making a majority of their revenue from TV viewing is up more than 30 percent since last year. The question for those creators, then, and for YouTube, is what to do about that. Should creators start uploading different kinds of videos aimed at the viewer on their couch instead of on their phone? Should they make videos that fans can listen to instead of watch?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Wilms acknowledges that the TV audience might want something slightly different from other YouTube platforms. He says creators are asking for better platform-specific analytics and hints that maybe YouTube shows should be treated like TV shows on IMDb and findable on platforms like JustWatch. But he says he\u2019s convinced that it can all still feel like YouTube, too. \u201cOur model is to bring all of YouTube to the TV,\u201d he says. \u201cHow does it work on the TV, without burdening the creators or making them do different things?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s been the question for a while now. Can YouTube be super interactive and super immersive, equal parts lean forward and lean back? Can it be home to all your favorite vloggers and the next big hit show? The company thinks it can. And to be fair, history says it\u2019s right \u2014 it already dominates watch time across platforms, is one of the biggest platforms in music, is rapidly eating podcasting, is now a major cable competitor, and much more. If YouTube can make the big screen and the small screen feel like the same screen, it\u2019ll become even more unstoppable. But that won\u2019t be easy to get right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n